I notice that the number of players online at any time is fairly low. Though that is fine for those who wants as much server capacity to themselves as possible it does limit the amount of player interaction possible. I'd love to see many more players and I'm thinking that Guild Software would like to see some more income too. Here are my suggestions:

- Referrals. Let people have x amount of time free for every x*3 time that referred players sign up to (only on signup time). This requires pretty banners for people to display on their pages.
- Google referrals (again pretty banners)
- Get Slashdot stories by doing interviews, technology news, update news or whatever. (Play on linux support.)
- Try to organize grassroot marketing campaigns at schools. (Create marketing material that can be easily printed/burned and handed out.)
- Contact news outlets in any country that has a developer with a "local" angle.
- Try to get reviewed on various tech/games podcasts.
- Organize an in-game player-driven support structure (or work harder on mentoring. Do established players get notified when newbies join the game?)
- Make nice lots of freebies (screensavers, backgrounds, themes, ingame music as mp3s). (You might want to contact some musicians who'd like to contribute some new music...)

I believe GS is waiting for some major backend changes and content additions (new economy, etc.) before their marketing spree. Of course, last year they were waiting for new UI before their marketing spree. So who knows.

Last year they didn't expect to tun into previously undocumented issues with the LISP programming language used to code bot behavior (among other things).

Since then, they've gone to a new language, written and tested new code, enhanced the UI, and are doing a bunch of back-end stuff. I expect that they still want to get the faction situation fixed before they push for an influx of new users.